The K computer simulates heart electrocardiograms at The University of Tokyo with highest accuracy

"We hope that the cellular level heart simulations conducted by supercomputers will be introduced to the surgery of congenital heart diseases that are difficult to operate and which require advanced skills."

Toshiaki Hisada
Research Professor, The University of Tokyo

Using Supercomputers for safer heart surgery

Customer

The University of Tokyo and Fujitsu have jointly developed a heart simulator visualizing cardiac motion at the cellular level. The ‘K computer’ (the supercomputer, which was jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu) performed the complex calculations modeling the motion of 640,000 cells to simulate the mechanism of the heart. In the future the simulator will enable doctors to plan for surgery more effectively by predicting the results of their interventions, and help to discover the causes of diseases, leading to new innovation in healthcare.

Challenge

To understand the exact expansions and contractions of the heart muscles, the action of every individual muscle cell must be simulated. Only a supercomputer with enormous computational capacity could handle such a complex task.

Solution

The University of Tokyo and Fujitsu have jointly developed a heart simulator visualizing cardiac motion at the cellular level. The K computer performs the complex calculations modeling the motion of 640,000 cells to simulate the mechanism of the heart.

Benefit

UT-Heart combines 640,000 digitally-modeled cardiac muscle cells with 200,000 degrees of freedom in order to simulate the real mechanisms of the heart

This simulation model produced almost the same electrocardiogram as that of the patients afte